‘Hear, hear!’ shouted Cuthbert, and banged the table.
Rampion frowned. He felt Cuthbert’s approbation as a personal insult.
‘I’m a counter-revolutionary,’ said Spandrell. ‘Put the spiritual lower classes in their place.’
‘Except in your own case, eh?’ said Cuthbert grinning.
‘Mayn’t one theorize?’
‘People have been forcibly putting them in their place for centuries,’ said Rampion; ‘and look at the result. You, among other things.’ He looked at Spandrell, who threw back his head and noiselessly laughed. ‘Look at the result,’ he repeated. ‘Inward personal revolution and consequent outward and social revolution.’
‘Come, come,’ said Willie Weaver. ‘You talk as though the thermidorian tumbrils were already rumbling. England still stands very much where it did.’
‘But what do you know of England and Englishmen?’ Rampion retorted. ‘You’ve never been out of London or your class. Go to the North.’
‘God forbid!’ Willie piously interjected.
‘Go to the coal and iron country. Talk a little with the steel workers. It isn’t revolution for a cause, It’s revolution as an end in itself. Smashing for smashing’s sake.’
‘Rather sympathetic it sounds,’ said Lucy.
‘It’s terrifying. It simply isn’t human. Their humanity has all been squeezed out of them by civilized living, squeezed out by the weight of coal and iron. It won’t be a rebellion of men. It’ll be a revolution of elementals, monsters, pre-human monsters. And you just shut your eyes and pretend everything’s too perfect.
‘Think of the disproportion,’ Lord Edward was saying, as he smoked his pipe. ‘It’s positively…’ His voice failed. ‘Take coal, for example. Man’s using a hundred and ten times as much as he used in i8oo. But population’s only two and a half times what it was. With other animals…Surely quite different. Consumption’s proportionate to numbers.’
Illidge objected. ‘But if animals can get more than they actually require to subsist, they take it, don’t they? If there’s been a battle or a plague, the hyenas and vultures take advantage of the abundance to overeat. Isn’t it the same with us? Forests died in great quantities some millions of years ago. Man has unearthed their corpses, finds he can use them and is giving himself the luxury of a real good guzzle while the carrion lasts. When the supplies are exhausted, he’ll go back to short rations, as the hyenas do in the intervals between wars and epidemics.’ Illidge spoke with gusto.
Talking about human beings as though they were indistinguishable from maggots filled him with a peculiar satisfaction. ‘A coal-field’s discovered; oil’s struck. Towns spring up, railways are built, ships come and go. To a long-lived observer on the moon, the swarming and crawling must look like the pullulation of ants and flies round a dead dog. Chilean nitre, Mexican oil, Tunisian phosphates—at every discovery another scurrying of insects. One can imagine the comments of the lunar astronomers. “These creatures have a remarkable and perhaps unique tropism towards fossilized carrion.”’
‘Like ostriches,’ said Mary Rampion. ‘You live like ostriches.’
‘And not about revolutions only,’ said Spandrell, while Willie Weaver was heard to put in something about ‘strouthocamelian philosophies.’ ‘About all the important things that happen to be disagreeable. There was a time when people didn’t go about pretending that death and sin didn’t exist. “Au ditour d’un sentier une charogne infame,”’ he quoted. ‘Baudelaire was the last poet of the Middle Ages as well as the first modern. “Et pourtant,”’ he went on, looking with a smile to Lucy and raising his glass.
‘“Et pourtant vous serez semblable a cette ordure,
A cette horrible infection,
Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,
Vous, mon ange et ma passion!
Alors, o ma beaute, dites a la vermine
Qui vous mangera de baisers…”’
‘My dear Spandrell!’ Lucy held up her hand protestingly.
‘Really too necrophilous!’ said Willie Weaver.
‘Always the same hatred of life,’ Rampion was thinking. ‘Different kinds of death—the only alternatives.’ He looked observantly into Spandrell’s face.
‘And when you come to think of it,’ Illidge was saying, ‘the time it took to form the coal measures divided by the length of a human life isn’t so hugely different from the life of a sequoia divided by a generation of decay bacteria.’
Cuthbert looked at his watch. ‘But good God!’ he shouted. ‘It’s twentyfive to one.’ He jumped up. ‘And I promised we’d put in an appearance at Widdicombe’s party. Peter, Willie! Quick march.’
‘But you can’t go,’ protested Lucy. ‘Not so absurdly early.’
‘The call of duty,’ Willie Weaver explained. ‘Stern Daughter of the Voice of God.’ He uttered his little cough of self-approbation.
‘But it’s ridiculous, it’s not permissible.’ She looked from one to another with a kind of angry anxiety. The dread of solitude was chronic with her. And it was always possible, if one sat up another five minutes, that something really amusing might happen. Besides, it was insufferable that people should do things she didn’t want them to do.
‘And we too, I’m afraid,’ said Mary Rampion rising.
Thank heaven, thought Walter. He hoped that Spandrell would follow the general example.
‘But this is impossible!’ cried Lucy. ‘Rampion, I simply cannot allow it.’
Mark Rampion only laughed. These professional sirens! he thought. She left him entirely cold, she repelled him. In desperation Lucy even appealed to the woman of the party.
‘Mrs. Rampion, you must stay. Five minutes more. Only five minutes,’ she coaxed.
In vain. The waiter opened the side door. Furtively they slipped out into the darkness.
‘Why will they insist on going?’ asked Lucy, plaintively.
‘Why will we insist on staying?’ echoed Spandrell. Walter’s heart sank; that meant the man didn’t intend to go. ‘Surely, that’s much more incomprehensible.’
Utterly incomprehensible! On Walter the heat and alcohol were having their usual effects. He was feeling ill as well as miserable. What was the point of sitting on, hopelessly, in this poisonous air? Why not go home at once. Marjorie would be pleased.
‘You, at least, are faithful, Walter.’ Lucy gave him a smile. He decided to postpone his departure. There was a silence.
Cuthbert and his companions had taken a cab. Refusing all invitations, the Rampions had preferred to walk.
‘Thank heaven!’ said Mary as the taxi drove away. ‘That dreadful Arkwright!’
‘Ah, but that woman’s worse,’ said Rampion.’she gives me the creeps. That poor silly little Bidlake boy. Like a rabbit in front of a weasel.’
‘That’s male trade unionism. I rather like her for making you men squirm a bit. Serves you right.’
‘You might as well like cobras.’ Rampion’s zoology was wholly symbolical.
‘But if it’s a matter of creeps, what about Spandrell? He’s like a gargoyle, a demon.’
‘He’s like a silly schoolboy,’ said Rampion emphatically. ‘He’s never grown up. Can’t you see that? He’s a permanent adolescent. Bothering his head about all the things that preoccupy adolescents. Not being able to live, because he’s too busy thinking about death and God and truth and mysticism and all the rest of it; too busy thinking about sins and trying to commit them and being disappointed because he’s not succeeding. It’s deplorable. The man’s a sort of Peter Pan—much worse even than Barrie’s disgusting little abortion, because he’s got stuck at a sillier age. He’s Peter Pan a la Dostoevsky-cum-de Musset-cum-the-Nineties-cum-Bunyan-cum-Byron and the Marquis de Sade. Really deplorable. The more so as he’s potentially a very decent human being.’
Mary laughed. ‘I suppose I shall have to take your word for it.’
‘By the way,’ said Lucy, turning to Spandrell. ‘I had a message from your mother.’ She gave it. Spandrell nodded, but made no comment.
‘And the General?’ he enquired as soon as she had finished speaking. He wanted no more said about his mother.
‘Oh, the General!’ Lucy made a grimace. ‘I had at least half an hour of Military Intelligence this evening. Really, he oughtn’t to be allowed. What about a Society for the Prevention of Generals?’
‘I’m an honorary and original member.’
‘Or why not for the Prevention of the Old, while one was about it?’ Lucy went on. ‘The old really aren’t possible. Except your father, Walter. He’s perfect. Really perfect. The only possible old man.’
‘One of the few completely impossible, if you only knew.’ Among the Bidlakes of Walter’s generation the impossibility of old John was almost axiomatic. ‘You wouldn’t find him quite so perfect if you’d been his wife or his daughter.’ As he uttered the words, Walter suddenly remembered Marjorie. The blood rushed to his cheeks.
‘Oh, of course, if you will go and choose him as a husband or a father,’ said Lucy, ‘ what can you expect? He’s a possible old man just because he’s been such an impossible husband and father. Most old people have had the life crushed out of them by their responsibilities. Your father never allowed himself to be squashed. He’s had wives and children and all the rest. But he’s always lived as though he were a boy on the spree. Not very pleasant for the wives and children, I grant. But how delightful for the rest of us!’
‘I suppose so,’ said Walter. He had always thought of himself as so utterly unlike his father. But he was acting just as his father had acted.
‘Think of him unfilially.’
‘I’ll try.’ How should he think of himself?’
Do, and you’ll see that I’m right. One of the few possible old men. Compare him with the others.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s no good; you can’t have any dealings with them.’
Spandrell laughed. ‘You speak of the old as though they were Kaffirs or Eskimos.’
‘Well, isn’t that just about what they are? Hearts of gold, and all that. And wonderfully intelligent—in their way, and all things considered. But they don’t happen to belong to our civilization. They’re aliens. I shall always remember the time I went to tea with some Arab ladies in Tunis. So kind they were, so hospitable. But they
